Friday, August 23

As a former cast member of Saturday Night Live, Julia Louis-Dreyfus should be the Seinfeld star whose skeletons are easiest to pull out of the closet. But NBC is ruthlessly about 86ing SNL clips from YouTube (with one odd mildly NSFW exception), so here's this instead: a TV report from Chicago about three local comic actors who had just hit the big time. The fresh-faced Louis-Dreyfus, her husband Brad Hall, and fellow SNL rookie Gary Kroeger reminded me of the excessively buoyant theater students from my college dorm - so, frankly, it's not the easiest six minutes for me to sit through.

That does it for our week-long excursion into Seinfeld prehistory. See the rest of it - and more video coffee beans plucked from the pile of civet droppings that is the Internet - in the Watch This First archive.

Thursday, August 22

Unlike his all-singing, all-dancing burgerstravaganza seen here on Tuesday, this static-camera clip finds Jason Alexander staying in one place to extol the virtues of a potato-chip brand I've never heard of. The overall effect is "Albert Brooks's flamboyant junk-food-addicted cousin."

Wednesday, August 21

Today's dig into the Seinfeld sediment yields a double treasure: Larry David and Michael Richards on ABC's briefly hip Saturday Night Live knockoff, Fridays, in 1981. Let's just say the show - including Richards' signature character, Battle Boy, a creepy little kid playing with army men - hasn't aged well. Was it shot on a speeding bus that would explode if the performers failed to deliver a pandering weed reference every thirty seconds? This two-minute excerpt has its share of cheap "ah-woo!"s, but both David and Richards get in a decent moment or two.

Tuesday, August 20

Yesterday I showed you the unfunny skeleton in Jerry Seinfeld's closet. But that was only, at worst, the second-most embarrassing moment for a future Seinfeld star. Presenting the classic 1985 commercial featuring Jason Alexander hoofing and crooning in honor of the McDLT, complete with cuffed sleeves on his white sport coat and either a bad toupee or a haircut that looks like one. Alexander makes the most of this no-win situation, throwing himself into the performance with the same whole-hearted enthusiasm that George Costanza put into his elaborate lies.

Monday, August 19

A decade before his own show revolutionized the sitcom, Jerry Seinfeld had a recurring role on a very un-revolutionary one, Benson. His character "Freddie" was a delivery boy who specialized in very bad jokes and very tight pants. A few seconds of this and even the Seinfeld finale starts to look pretty good.

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